The Poetry Marathon

I loved my father

but sometimes he drank

and the closet was the only place to hide.

I listened through the door

as he raged his inner battle

and I crouched in the dark, hiding from

what I’d done wrong. Please drunk daddy

don’t hit me again. I sobbed, hoping he’d never

find me because the closet’s the only place

to hide.

The President is on TV just now

telling us it’s fake news again.

They stole the win, he did nothing wrong,

And he should know this

because HE’S THE PRESIDENT,

THE  PRESIDENT of all Presidents,

Past, Present, and Future. I listen as

sirens flutter overhead

like helicopters searching for truth.

I take off my gloves

and walk out into the night, watching

cold faces gathering

to photograph the evidence,

asking each other how it happened

in front of their noses.

No one saw anything until it all

went up in flames. I watched

the vastness of his blonde hair waving

across his face like explosives. He said,

“It’s fake news again. Fake, Fake News

again”. Then the tiny hands of our watches stopped

ticking and fell silent.

She began her tour of Grief

as doom clouds

enveloped

the waters

off Puget Sound,

shrouding it

in white foam,

mirroring

the sky

where clouds

of smoke

and a complex mix

of menacing seas

bury

the Orcas

below.

They are hunting,

their clicking sounds,

searching

like a flashlight, the only sound

in the chilly

depths

where they

try to sink

their white sharp teeth

into the fatty

coral-colored flesh

of the King Salmon.

As the waters start warming

and the salmon die off,

a female Orca nicknamed Tahlequah

swims 1,000 miles before

dropping her dead calf which she’s

been pushing with her head,

in an unprecedented 17-day show

of mourning.

Doom stars are exploding

a mind-blowing distance away,

a luminous fast blue explosion fades

faster than a supernova.

One giant star

twenty times as big as the sun

exploding where a

massive star should not have been

and might be a portal to more

than can be accounted for in the universe,

a magnetic moment when blue light wobbles

and transports us

a mind-blowing distance away

to a place where a human

should never have been.

Spirited away, your swamps’ moody ghost

somehow he returned to you.

Your newly found creature, nearly forgotten,

and then you remember somehow, he was your son.

He was a child, unable to speak, when he was

spirited away, your swamps’ moody ghost,

just as he came out of his shell hearing his mom’s

mixed up bedtime stories and

In the grip of her attending to business, he was

spirited away, your swamps moody ghost.

Yes he was spirited away by someone he once needed

who didn’t need him anymore.

Spirited away, your swamps moody ghost

by the only person

he ever needed who didn’t even say goodnight when he was

Spirited away, your swamps’ moody ghost.

A woman sings and you will die

without her song. Her voice brings you

back to life and it’s intoxicating.

She sings, turning into thin air,

the breath of the woman you love

escaping you. You must find her to breathe,

you must give her

mouth to mouth,

you must breathe her song

back to her through her

open lips. A woman sings

and you’re so in love,

her soft mellow tone

becomes a melody.

at the edge of the earth

where the universe stops

humming

and the hush

of the end of the earth

begins,

what is it

we will hear?

The end

of gravitational waves,

created

by two people,

or a collective, humming

at much lower

frequencies,

everywhere all at once?

The super binary

pulsars

of massive

black

holes,

the source

of gravitational waves

@She

what were you thinking you were texting HER when your car

plowed into us pushing my SUV off that side of that mountain road rolling rolling

rolling down with my rolling son strapped rolling in the back rolling in his car seat

rolling all the way rolling down the hill rolling down to the very bottom where

you died and we were just driving along safely along on our lovely way to a lovely day

camp for a lovely lovely day and we were so lucky lucky to be extracted

from our lovely car with only a few broken lovely bones broken lovingly

@He

a woman’s alone at her home on a quiet country road in the early morning where a stranger begins

pounding pounding pounding on her door random she believes him
when he tells her he’s harmless simply run

out of gas needs to use her phone she

obliges only a homeless drifter hiding

nearby with a .22-caliber rifle you see he only wanted

to be a rock star and he knew she played the violin so he shot her

the first shot hit her in the chest and

then the leg twice and she turned bloody but she was still bloody
alive and you see he needed to bloody kill her

On the first day of spring

I drove by that place you took me once

because your father was still

building those beautiful houses

that were still only bones of themselves.

We could only see the darkness

that lay between the framed wood.

It filled our imaginations with delight,

and so we parked and kissed deeply.

Now those moments are etched

in our hearts like matching tattoos or the stained-glass windows

on the finished house that even your mother’s strident disapproval

couldn’t remove. I want to share this with you

as the sun melts the snow and leaves.

The crocuses are blissfully naked and dripping.

This is the moment I chose for you to relive with me now

as it should have been then.

Dearheart

I was young and we

were riding bicycles across Iceland,

ashen land, young men

following me everywhere looking at brown

eyes because they’d never spoken anyone’s

brown I understand that just by

looking delightfully cold at blue heartbeats

crystallized stillness roped off places you can

simply melt inside Blue

Lagoon hot, you simply

melt just by swimming looking up

at blue heartbeats of delightfully cold blue crystal Icelandic sky

she was young, eloquent feet, ballerina soloist, radiant creamy

skin, one of the bluest stars dancing extraordinarily

Iceland blue in the sky blue heatbeats dancing

her eloquent feet deteriorating blue

heartbeats pounds piled on her skin so horrible debilitating

pounds piled on her neck thick with a

stomach roll didn’t even recognize how blue

took hold didn’t recognize how blue took

hold of her extraordinary crystal gift

cold blue broken crystal barre roped off workouts

simply dance melting inside blue crystallized stillness,

simply melts just by dancing, looking up

at the blue heartbeats cold blue crystallized stillness